Welcome to Places of Encounter. This text offers a new approach to learning about world history by taking you to the places where major developments in our past have occurred. Each chapter is designed to send you on a journey to a specific location associated with momentous historical events and epochs. Both volumes of this text are inspired by our desire to share with you the passion we have for the places we study and conduct our research as historians. We want to convey the excitement we feel in the places where major changes in human history occurred. Like you, we started learning the stories of our past as readers. We too discovered that we are connected to many places in the world through our common human ancestry and through the interactions of people and societies over time and across the globe. We wondered what it would be like to travel back in time to the places we read about but could only imagine. We realized that being in a historical place unlocks a portal to the past and allows us to see the intersections of land, environments, and human structures that lie at the heart of historical processes.
Themes
Places is organized around three main principles: change over time, connectivity, and the recurrence of certain themes throughout human history.
•To show change over time, the text offers a basic chronological sequence of history that begins in Volume I with the emergence of hominids (early humans) in Ethiopia and ends in Volume II with the emergence of the global, postindustrial city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The volumes cover important turning points in human history, from the formation of the earliest human communities and towns through the foundation of cities, states, and empires and the development of industrialization, to the emergence of postindustrial globalization.
•To demonstrate the second principle, connectivity, both volumes present individual locations as part of a global nexus of historical and geographic connections. Each chapter identifies key regional and global connections among societies, places, peoples, and eras, demonstrating that world history is very much about connections and interactions across time and space. Each place in these volumes developed through linkages to previous historical eras and in turn shaped future historical actors and movements. Geography and environment also shaped the links people forged. In some cases, these links were regional—connecting people along a coastline with others in the interior, as in Cape Town, South Africa, or within areas of oceanic trade in the Atlantic or Indian oceans. In other cases global connections spanned outward from major urban centers such as Carthage or London in search of resources, territory, and labor, building land- and sea-based empires in the process. Similarly, technologies in the form of ships, airplanes, and even rocket-propelled weapons provided for global strands of connectivity.
•Third, the text emphasizes significant thematic elements that recur in human history. History is so vast that, in order to find some meaning in it, historians study it through different lenses or viewpoints that reflect what we deem important in our own lives. In Places we have emphasized themes that include migration (where and why people moved around the continent or globe); class, race, ethnicity, and gender (how humans form social and economic identities); urbanization and colonialism (how they organized themselves spatially and politically); and technology, trade, and commerce (what they built and the values they placed on those things). In the thematic table of contents you’ll see all these major themes and which chapters emphasize which themes.
Overall, as you will see, the picture of our past that emerges from these volumes is like a satellite map of the world at night: as a particular place becomes important, it glows and then fades as another location takes preeminence. Like a mosaic with endless links connecting the different locations, Places spotlights individual pieces, inextricably linked to the others, together making up the picture of each epoch. Places will show you a picture of history not as a simple sequential process but rather a dynamic, multitextured combination of overlapping eras—like overlapping notes in a musical chord. We hope you will appreciate the chapters both individually and collectively, as they provide a broader landscape of the ways people and places interacted to shape our past.
Reading and Using Places of Encounter
Places is intended to allow you to engage with history in various locations around the world, even if you cannot actually be there. When you’ve studied history before, it was probably narrated like a story, with one event following another in a linear way. Instead of telling a linear story, this book uses place-based history to illustrate the past. If you have ever visited a historical site like an old house or a historic location like a battlefield, you’re familiar with place-based history. The chapters are organized similarly:
•A Personal Prologue outlines the author’s personal engagement with the place—how he or she came to be interested in that particular place and why. Consider how and why the authors found their passion in a particular place and time. Do you have a similar interest in a historical place or have you been inspired by a visit or tour to a historical monument marking an important political, religious, or cultural event that happened there? Perhaps you’ve visited a location where your ancestors lived or emigrated?
•Themain narrative of the chapter introduces the place in a particular time. Understanding the historical context—including geographic and environmental features; available technologies and skills; and ethnicity, language, gender, nationalism, and religious beliefs—is essential to understanding the history of the place you are reading about. Imagine, for example, what your life would be like without cars or computers (technology), or how your life would be different if you lived in a society where some people were enslaved due to their race, gender, or ethnic background.
•TheGlobal Connections section of the chapter shows the linkages of this place and time with other parts of the region or the world as well as how this chapter relates to the chapters that come before and after. Because human encounters are often the precursors to historic developments as a result of the exchange of ideas and goods or the clash of cultural and religious beliefs, these connections tell the story of this place’s role in world history.
•The Encounters as Told: Primary Sources section gives you a chance to read firsthand accounts about those human encounters in the sources they left behind. These sources range from travelogues and diaries to government documents and treatises related to historical developments. Questions and notes at the beginning of each document will help you explore the relationship between the documents and the chapter narrative. You will also need to consider the context of the documents by asking questions such as: Who wrote the document and who was the intended audience? What was the writer’s intent—to write a newspaper article, a government document, a propaganda piece, or something else? What sorts of things are left out or hidden in the document? Are women or indigenous people mentioned, and in what context? How do the writer’s gender and socioeconomic class compare to those of the people mentioned in the document? What sorts of biases can you see in the source? How does the document help you better understand the chapter you just read? Does it refer to the physical place or perhaps to different people in the location? Does it depict people or place positively or not?
•Maps will show you the relationship of the place to the rest of the world and the region with which it is associated as well as the important spatial features that are referred to in the body of the chapter.
•Finally, each chapter provides a list of additional resources divided into two main categories. The first is further reading resources authors have recommended. Although these are not an exhaustive list of what other historians have written on the topic, they will enable you to get a deeper, more detailed understanding of some of the key developments that occurred in each location and to consider why these places are so important to world history. The second is a list of Internet URLs or web page references. These websites provide important visual materials and discussion of related ideas and analyses, and they are well worth exploring. Although you may not be able to travel to every place in the text, the chapters and secondary readings and recommended secondary readings may be the next best thing, providing you with significant insight into these places and the important roles they played. We hope that Places of Encounter will inspire you to ask questions of the past and the places in which it took shape as well as to undertake your own journeys of discovery to visit some of these locations—and others—that are part of the living history of our world.
Read on, and may you find the world to be as exciting a place as we and our fellow authors do!
Aran and Elaine MacKinnon, editors
Welcome to Places of Encounter. This text provides a unique approach to world history. It is designed to allow students to experience the places where major developments took shape and to feel the excitement that comes from imagining historical events as and where they happened. It is inspired by the connections the authors have to the locations they have studied and visited as well as their belief that students share their excitement about world history as they are introduced to these places. It builds on well-established approaches to writing history by situating stories in a specific place to show how the local experience can be relevant to broader global experiences. It also goes beyond these studies by taking advantage of new approaches in environmental and place-based history. These approaches emphasize the importance of the historical and imagined relations between people and the land, and they show how these can be understood by considering the connections people make between place and the past. Additionally, Places of Encounter takes these place-based relationships and connects them to the wider currents of global history. Each chapter shows the reader how and where its place is connected temporally and spatially to other historically significant regions and developments. In these ways it seeks to provide students and instructors with both new perspectives and new tools for looking at major developments in world history.
The text is divided into two volumes, one for each of the major chronological blocks of time that are most often taught in two-term courses at college and universities. (For courses with different chronological breaks, each chapter is also available in digital form so that the book can be easily customized to fit every course.)
Places of Encounter can be assigned in at least two ways. First, by supplementing the content with lecture material, instructors can assign Places as a main text, guiding students along the overall arc of chronological history through the chapter progression. Volume I begins this progression with the emergence of modern humans in Hadar, Ethiopia, and South Africa, and then it takes the students through the development of early settled human communities and urban complexes in Mesopotamia, China, and the Mediterranean. It shows how and where trade-based societies and their cultures emerged and made connections in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, and how these then connected to the emergence of imperial ventures and global commercial connections from Europe to the Americas and elsewhere on the globe.
The arc continues in Volume II and guides students through the early-modern period of burgeoning empires and the expansion of merchant-capitalism in the Atlantic world and Asia to the emergence of major industrial metropoles in Europe and East Asia. It then turns to the era of competition and conflict through the World Wars and into the global Cold War, ending with the era of intensified decolonization, globalization, and urbanization.
Alternatively, the volumes can be used to supplement a traditional survey text. The place-based approach allows for more detailed studies of the major developments and themes addressed in a survey textbook, providing a foundation for discussion and analysis of multiple topics and themes for each location. The primary source documents, called “Encounters as Told,” can be the foundation for primary source analyses in class.
Chapters have a consistent structure, including the following components (described in the Note to the Student, above):
•PersonalPrologue discusses the author’s personal connection to the place, often including the author’s own physical and cultural encounters with the locality and its people.
•TheChapter Narrative explains how and why particular places became important. Additionally, they provide a compelling and focused case study of how the local environment intersects with major historical developments.
•GlobalConnections in each chapter show how broader regional and global developments are tied to various places that were central to specific historical eras and movement.
•Maps show the relationship of the place to the rest of the world and the region with which it is associated as well as the important spatial features that are referred to in the body of the chapter.
•Encountersas Told: Primary Sources provide opportunities for students to consider voice, biases, and agency in history.
•FurtherReading and Web Resources provide more detail on select topics as well as ways to further explore the location in the context of the latest historiographical approaches to the field.
Places is organized to be flexible and can be used in a number of ways:
1.Most obviously, successive chapters can be assigned in the rough chronological order the book reflects. Each chapter then shows how broader regional and global connections and developments are tied to various nodes, places that were central to specific historical developments. Thus, the chapters help explain how and why particular places became important. Additionally, they provide a compelling and focused case study of how the local environment intersects with major historical movements.
2.Because the chapters are based around a series of major themes, an instructor might choose to cut across chronology and follow these categories of analysis across time and space. The thematic table of contents shows the thematic connections among chapters. Instructors can select one or more themes to revisit as they move through the world history sequence to see how these themes differed from place to place and over time. For example, students can compare and contrast how people interacted with their environments as early hominids in Ethiopia and as globalized investors developing real estate in Dubai. Alternatively, chapters can be selected to supplement the instructor’s own lectures or a traditional text.
3.The regional table of contents shows which chapters touch on which global regions. A list of regional connections provides the possibility of showing students how various locations intersect and influence each other. As with many approaches to world history, we believe the links and contingencies among societies and regions are fundamental to understanding world history. Each chapter, therefore, makes explicit links to other chapters, regions, and time periods as well as to broader developments that relate to a given region.
4.Places of Encounters takes advantage of exciting new Internet-based technologies to enhance the ways students can see and engage with the chapter locations. Each chapter concludes with suggested websites. Using Google Earth, readers can see the geographical location in a global context and may use Google Earth tours to see more details about particular places.
We would like to thank the many reviewers whose careful reading of the chapters provided helpful insights to make this book a better fit for their classrooms:
Brett Berliner, Morgan State University
Gayle K. Brunelle, California State University, Fullerton
Samuel Brunk, University of Texas at El Paso
Alister Chapman, Westmont College
Arthur T. Coumbe, Troy State University
Eugene Cruz-Oribe, California State University, Monterey Bay
Edward Davies, University of Utah
Margaret Handke, Minnesota State University, Mankato
Paul Hatley, Rogers State University
Andrew J. Kirkendall, Texas A & M University
Ari Daniel Levine, University of Georgia
Senya Lubisich, Citrus College
Harold Marcuse, University of California, Santa Barbara
David Meier, Dickinson State University
Chad Ross, East Carolina University
Quinn Slobodian, Wellesley College
Evan R. Ward, Brigham Young University
Jeffrey Wilson, California State University, Sacramento
Special thanks to the students in Eugene Cruz-Uribe’s world history class at Cal State Monterey Bay, who read and evaluated chapters from the book.
Read and enjoy, and hopefully together we can inspire students to follow in our footsteps!
Aran and Elaine MacKinnon, editors